ED020501: Hell Behind Bars: The Crime that Dare not Speak its Name

ED020501: Hell Behind Bars: The Crime that Dare not Speak its Name

Prison rape may be America's most ignored crime problem. Since the
mid 1970s, male-on-male rape has become more common than
male-on-female rape, and a key reason for this is that the prison
population has quadrupled. Prison rape tortures inmates, spreads
AIDS, and increases the power of racist gangs-but almost nobody
wants to talk about it. Academic research suggests that the problem
is widespread. University of Nebraska professor Cindy
Stuckman-Johnson reported in The Journal of Sex Research that 22
percent of male inmates in Nebraska prisons experienced unwanted
sexual contact. Extrapolating from her Nebraska findings and
earlier studies in New York, California, and Pennsylvania, Stephen
Donaldson, the late president of the activist group Stop Prisoner
Rape, estimated that over 240,000 men get raped in prison each
year. By contrast, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics,
in 1999 men raped 141,000 women.

And while female rape victims typically get raped only once,
imprisoned men can get raped thousands of times; physically weak
inmates get raped the most. Accounts of prison life by authors such
as Harold S. Long and James Hogshire depict a horrible pattern:
Prisoners arriving at correctional facilities typically get
challenged to a fight within a few days of arrival; those who fight
poorly or run away get labeled as "punks" or sex slaves.
Punks-usually young, nonviolent offenders, and often pretrial
detainees-typically fall victim to a series of gang rapes that may
continue for anywhere from a few days to several years. A
survival-minded punk eventually settles down to serve a "man" who
protects him from other predators in return for regular sex for the
man and his friends. In effect, this can amount to daily rape for
years on end. Rampant prison overcrowding-which shows only minimal
signs of easing-has made this problem even worse: With more men in
each cell, it becomes possible for some serial rapists to acquire
harems of punks.

Regular group anal sex spreads AIDS very quickly. "AIDS is a
major, major threat in prisons, and the fact that any rape may be a
death sentence plays up the psychological terror involved in rape,"
says Terry Kupers, an Oakland psychiatrist who has written
extensively about mental health in prisons. Writing in the journal
AIDS, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention researchers Hazel
Dean-Gaitor and Patricia Fleming find that prisoners have nearly
six times the AIDS-infection rate of the population as a whole.

Prison rape also carries strong racial overtones. Prison
administrators "want to keep the black gangs quiet," says Ginnette
West, the mother of a prison-rape victim who runs the small
Illinois-based activist group Mothers Against Prison Rape-HIV/AIDS.
"They know they'll be in an uproar if they don't get something to
release their sex drive, and usually it's young, nonviolent inmates
of a different race." The view from the inside is much the same:
"The wolves [serial rapists] are almost all black, while punks are
almost all white," writes Hogshire in his book, You Are Going to
Prison. The white-supremacist gangs that proliferate behind prison
bars do the same thing in reverse, seeking out black punks.

Rape serves as a prison-management tool. Racist gangs make
things easier for prison administrators: They spend so much time
fighting one another that they don't turn against staff. Rape often
serves as a form of punishment for those who threaten to disrupt
the flow of drugs and other contraband that the gangs control in
most prison systems. Indeed, prison administrators sometimes
facilitate rapes: A 1998 Los Angeles Times investigation of
brutality in California's Corcoran State Prison found that guards
sometimes sent troublesome prisoners to live with one man, who
raped inmates in return for favors from prison staff. Such
practices are common. "I've heard about prisons where they always
make sure there is one [punk] per tier as a safety valve for the
population," says Ken Haas, a professor at the University of
Delaware who coedited the widely used anthology The Dilemmas of
Corrections.

A code of silence that nearly all prison inmates adhere to means
that prison rape almost never gets reported. "This silence spares
cost-conscious prison officials the expense and burden of
investigating and prosecuting incidents of prison rape," writes
Victor Hassine, a convicted murderer turned college-textbook writer
who has spent the last twenty years in a variety of Pennsylvania
state prisons. "Rapists are thus virtually handed licenses for
their attacks."

Although nobody defends prison rape in public or even denies
that it poses a problem, reform efforts rarely succeed. Tom Cahill,
a self-described "full-time radical-Left activist" and prison-rape
victim who now heads Stop Prisoner Rape, complains that mainstream
human-rights groups shun the issue of male-on-male rape. "Amnesty
International asked me to speak for them a few years ago, and all
they wanted me to talk about was women being raped by male guards,"
he says. "Rape is a problem, but it's not the dominant one for
women behind bars. For men, it's an enormous issue."

Cal Skinner, a conservative who supports harsher criminal
penalties and more prison construction, believes that his 16 years
in the Illinois House ended with a primary defeat last fall in part
because he devoted so much time to meeting with prisoners and
pushing anti-prison-rape legislation. "Convicted criminals aren't
the most popular people with conservative voters in a conservative
district," he explains. Although the Illinois prison system did
issue new regulations aimed at stemming prison rape in the wake of
Skinner's efforts, his more ambitious bills to crack down on prison
rape never made it to the floor of the legislature. Similar
single-legislator crusades fizzled in Delaware and Florida, as did
the efforts of Sens. Edward Kennedy and Barbara Boxer to establish
a select committee on the issue. To the public, prison rape has
become a joke: Films like The Naked Gun 33 1/3 and the Norm
MacDonald movie Dirty Work make light comedy out of rape behind
bars. Similar jokes about any other violent crime would draw loud
protests from politicians and advocacy groups.

Michael J. Horowitz, a Hudson Institute scholar who has led
human-rights crusades against the sex-slave trade and the
persecution of Christians, proposes federal standards to prevent
prison rape. "There is not a single major private group that
accredits prisons that sets standards for preventing rape," says
Horowitz. "This is a serious human-rights crisis." If Horowitz's
efforts gain traction, San Francisco's protocols-in place since
1975-might become a national model. In San Francisco jails,
weak-looking, effeminate, or transsexual offenders are separated
from other prisoners. Inmates who fall victim to rape get moved
into protected areas screened to keep out potential rapists. Even
in San Francisco, however, not everything works perfectly. "Rape
still goes on in our system," admits assistant sheriff Michael
Marcum. "But we have some facilities where I feel comfortable
saying that it doesn't go on at all."

People go to jail because society wants to punish them; but the
punishments of prison rape seem manifestly at odds with commonly
accepted standards of justice. Jailhouse rapists select victims
from the least violent segments of the prison population. And even
the most dangerous prisoners hardly deserve the real threat of
death from AIDS. The success of the reform efforts will depend on
whether the public is willing to recognize that even convicted
offenders have fundamental human rights-and that condoning repeated
violations of those rights serves no legitimate public purpose.